[Mb-civic] Tehran's dangerous influence on Iraqi politics - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Tehran's dangerous influence on Iraqi politics

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  March 14, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

AS THE WAR of ever-escalating threats between Iran and the United States 
rages, the rest of the world watches with growing alarm as the battle of 
wills over uranium enrichment moves on into the UN Security Council.

Washington growls about the serious consequences and the dire price that 
Iran will pay if it refuses to bow. Israel says an Iranian nuclear bomb 
is out of the question, while Iran says America ''is also susceptible to 
harm and pain."

There is a sense of ''deja vu," as Russia's foreign minister, Sergei 
Lavrov, put it, harking back to the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002. ''I 
don't believe we should engage in something which might become a 
self-fulfilling prophecy," he said.

Americans have studied their military options. Reconnaissance teams have 
infiltrated into Iran looking for targets and opportunities, and 
pilotless planes have been over-flying Iran to probe Iranian air 
defenses. Few think that Iran's nuclear facilities could be knocked out 
overnight, however, and the regime changers in the Pentagon no longer 
have the voice they once had after the failure of Iraq.

In the meantime Iran is strengthening its ties with Syria and Lebanon, 
and promises to help Hamas escape the restrictions the United States and 
Israel hope to impose on it after its victory in Palestinian elections. 
And then there is always the oil weapon.

The irony is that the United States has played a role in enabling Iran. 
Consider that only four years ago Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was a thorn 
in Iran's eastern flank until that thorn was drawn by American military 
action.

On Iran's western border not only did America get rid of archenemy 
Saddam Hussein, but also empowered Iraq's downtrodden Shi'ites, who have 
long had close relations with Iran. Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim 
al-Jaafari, spent the Iran-Iraq war in Tehran, and some of the Shi'ite 
militias now operating in Iraq actually fought for Iran against Iraq. 
And the most powerful religious figure in Iraq today, Ayatollah Ali 
al-Sistani, is an Iranian.

An incident when I was in Baghdad last autumn underlined the growing 
influence of Iran in Iraqi politics. A de-Ba'athification committee 
ruled that a monument to Iraqi prisoners of war during the Iran-Iraq war 
should be removed from a Baghdad street because it might cause bad 
feelings toward Iran. The only equivalent I could think of is what the 
reaction in the United States would be if citizens were told they had to 
take down the Iwo Jima memorial outside Washington.

One of America's growing nightmares is that the low-level civil war 
going on just beneath the surface in Iraq will escalate to drag in 
neighboring countries rushing to support their co-religionists.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. The architects of America's 
invasion of Iraq envisioned a stable, secular, pro-Western democracy in 
Iraq that would undermine Iran's theocracy next door. Instead it is 
Iran's theocracy next door that holds the key to undermining anything 
the United States may still plan to do with its disaster in Iraq. At the 
very least, Iran has the power to make sure that American troops are 
tied down between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers indefinitely.

Those who planned our Iraq adventure seemed to think that empowering 
Iraq's Shi'ites would play to their advantage. George Packer, in his 
authoritative book on America in Iraq, ''The Assassins' Gate," tells of 
a curious belief among some neo-conservatives that the Shia of Iraq were 
somehow more malleable than their Sunni brethren, and that traditional 
Iraqi Shi'ism could ''lead the way to reorienting the Arab world toward 
America and Israel.

''This thinking ran high up the policy chain at the Pentagon," Packer 
writes, influencing Douglas Feith, who was supposed to be in charge of 
postwar planning. ''You Shia in Iraq have a historical opportunity, " 
Feith told an Iraqi exile before the war. ''Do whatever you can, but 
don't speak about it." Few things could alarm our traditional Sunni 
allies in the Middle East more.

Today Americans in Iraq are less encouraged by what they have seen of 
Shia politics, and today Americans are threatening the Shi'ites with 
withdrawing American support if they fail to include Sunnis in a 
government of national unity.

But since there is no national unity in Iraq, a unity government could 
only be a triumph of appearances over reality, and the big winner in 
America's Iraq war is likely to be Iran.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/14/tehrans_dangerous_influence_on_iraqi_politics/
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